🤔 The ENS Frenzy - By Andrew Steinwold And Trevor Grant

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Hey everyone! Here’s what we got for you this week:

News

Market

Collectibles

Gaming

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Table of Contents

📰 News

Otherside tech demo on July 16th

The official Yuga Labs Otherside Twitter account announced that the first tech demo for Otherside will be on July 16th.

This is great because, after all the Otherside hype (and gas fees), a short video released about a month ago is all we’ve got to go off of.

This announcement has led to a lot of speculation on Otherdeed land NFTs. For Otherdeed holders and potential buyers, a lot is riding on how well this demo is received.

An important thing to watch is Koda NFTs placed on Otherdeed land plots. The floor for plots with Kodas is ~2.8 ETH while the floor for ones with a Koda is 19.5 ETH. Simple subtraction shows us that Koda NFTs are already worth over 16 ETH. This supports the speculation that Koda NFTs will most likely have significant utility within Otherside.

OpenSea Launchpad

OpenSea partnered up with an NFT collection called Zoonies to debut its Launchpad experience in mid-July. Other NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden have already found great success with their launch pads so it’s about time for OpenSea to start offering their own.

What’s a launch pad?

Launchpads help projects with everything that goes into launching an NFT project like minting contracts, whitelist management, marketplace support, and a host of services around marketing.

Exchanges like Magic Eden, and now OpenSea mainly offer these services as a way to draw collections over to their platform.

In related news

OpenSea Co-founder Alex Atallah will leave the company on July 30th. His reasoning for leaving is based on his desire to return to building projects from 0 to 1.

Atallah founded OpenSea in 2018 with CEO Devin Finzer. His stake in the company is currently worth an estimated $2.2B. He will remain on the board.

Raoul Pal launches a new company

Raoul Pal is the founder of Real Vision and one of the most well-known commentators in the crypto industry (listen to Andrew’s episode on Real Vision here.) Pal just teamed up with Delphi Digital’s Kevin Kelly and the longtime entertainment & media exec David Pemsel to start a new token studio called ScienceMagic.Studios.

Token studio?

Pal has long been talking about the $63T in intangible assets sitting on corporate balance sheets. This includes things like IP, music, fashion, movies/book/TV franchises, and sports.

Pal, Kelley, and Pemsel believe that they can help big brands move into Web3 in the right way – by utilizing utilize web3 technologies such as NFTs and social tokens to increase interaction with fans and communities.

📉 Market

ENS frenzy

This week, ENS domains accounted for ~20% of OpenSea’s trading volume.

Various “clubs” have been established around different sets of numeric ENS domains.

Notable clubs:

999 Club – three digit numeric (000-999) —> 36ETH Floor
Arabic 999 Club – three digit arabic numerals —> 4.7ETH Floor
10k Club – four digit numeric (0000-9999)—> 2ETH Floor
999 CN Club – three digit Chinese numerals —> 1.3 ETH Floor

The collector narrative around numeric ens names is picking up a lot of steam. Twitter is now filled with “I love my 000.eth more than my punk” type commentary.

“The value an asset is defined by those who value it & are willing to assign value to it- not those who sit on the sidelines and say it should be worthless”

– DCInvestor

👤 Collectibles

What is Ryan Carson up to?

Once upon a time, Ryan Carson was the COO of Proof Collective, the NFT collector community founded by Kevin Rose. Then, only a week after Proof launched Moonbirds, he left to start his own NFT fund, 121G.

Carson was criticized for constant Twitter commentary and speculation regarding the Moonbirds price. He also received a ton of backlash for his supposed Moonbirds insider trading after sweeping up the Moonbirds floor prior to the rarity reveal.

Despite all the negative vibes surrounding Carson, his relationship with Kevin Rose appears to still be solid.

Fast forward to now

To avoid any conflict of interest between his personal portfolio and his fund’s portfolio, Carson sold all of his Proof passes and Moonbirds. This includes selling his ultra-rare cosmic Moonbird for 143.69ETH.

Now on Friday, 121G made its first capital deployment….to sweep up 34 Moonbirds

Doing so in this market is a little odd, but Carson said they didn’t want to get front run when asked why they weren’t just buying in slowly.

But, to Carson’s credit, 121G is very much staying on thesis. On their website, they outline their three-pillar strategy:

High-quality new projects lead by vetted teams
One-of-ones
Proof and Moonbirds

Moonbirds Ravens

Proof just registered a new trademark for Moonbirds Ravens, causing the collections floor to hit ~30ETH. Many are beginning to speculate that this will be a new PFP collection.

But don’t worry – Ryan Carson wasn’t front running it.

3AC public NFT holdings revealed

Researchers at 21 Shares put together a Dune analytics dashboard tracking public wallet addresses belonging to the now insolvent Three Arrows Capital. The research shows that the firm holds a number of blue-chip NFTs totaling $7.5M.

Holdings:

$3,012,393 – 11 CryptoPunks
$2,482,934- 330 ArtBlocksCurated
$613,273 – 8 PEGZ
$564,018 – 4 DeafbeefV2
$304,025 – 3 Autoglyphs
$125,241 – 7 ArtBlocks
$122,517 – 2 MutantApeYachtClub
$73,784 – 7 ChromieSquiggle
$61,909 – 1 BoredApeYachtClub

Doodles Bucket Auction

Doodles just wrapped up its public auction for its Genesis Box Collection. The auction went well and generated 11,975.42 ETH in sales but that’s not the story.

What’s important to note is that only 23 ETH was spent on gas fees. For reference, the Yuga Labs Otherside mint cost users 64,000 ETH in gas.

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🕹 Gaming

Axie Infinity returns

Axie Infinity was frozen after being hacked for $625M in March. Last week the team officially reopened the game’s deposits and withdrawals.

It has certainly been a rough few months for Axie. The game’s daily revenues have sunk to ~$11,000 from $17,000,000 back in August.

Luckily there is finally some good news. After 3 audits the Ronin Bridge is back open so hopefully, they can get things back on track.

Key points:

They recovered all lost user funds
All user funds are fully backed 1:1 by the new bridge
The new bridge design includes a circuit-breaker system to help protect against large suspicious withdrawals

🎙 Zima Red Podcast

Tim Schuermer is a co-founder of Gallop. Gallop has created a set of developer tools that expand the utility of NFTs. These tools are built for all developers, creators and investors, active in the NFT space.

In this episode we discuss: